Mail News Service
Jamshedpur, Nov 1: A hollow-cheeked man wearing a much washed pajama, a timeworn khaki half shirt and that essentially aged marketing bag to hold half kg of potatoes, 250 grams of onions and 50 grams of chilly to burn the remnants of a plastic wallet besides another place, are a trade mark, every day feature that rigidly remains in a community of haves and have not�s, unwilling to die but forced to live. He is in his 70s. He was born at that age and has lived through time with that age that has no ending until further humiliations of living are met. That is the portrait of what they call in economics jargon a moron from a moronic community described as the middle class that can neither opt to live nor prefer to die.
This middle class specimen is seen pushing his neck through the crowds of buyers at vegetable markets and grocery stalls listening to the price of middle class essentials but not daring to ask himself. But he must have something besides the inevitable dal-bhat-roti for himself and his family. He avoids the �untouchable� onion-potato stalls and goes for one kilo of brinjals adding upto four big and one medium sized ones to add variety to the insipid culinary art of the wife at home � insipid because the spices are too dear for the kitchen necessities. The free ration rice and half kilo of lentils are all there are to show for monthly groceries. The marketing done, this middle class specimen trudges back home, takes a dip in the community pond, returns, has boiled rice and walks off to work at Hari�s Tea Stall of making tea, washing glasses, cleaning the dustbin of disposable glasses. By the way, he is Hari who is his own handyman and makes a clean two thousand bucks a month at an average and has a family of five including one adolescent son, one still minor daughter, one stray but trustworthy dog and of course that one wife who manages her middle class husband without letting him get into debt.
Hari has just one luxury which he is determined not to give up. He loves tea and the ratio of his consumption is 20:1 meaning for every 20 disposable cups of tea sold he drinks one cup himself and yet ensures that two thousand rupees income. During the recent Durgotsav Hari and the wife took out the children as a rare occasion but leaving the dog to guard the ramshackle, one room hut, on Navami evening and walked around a few puja pandals, bought nothing, gazed at nothing, but paid obeisance to the Mother and Her Divine Children right from their hearts and returned home to a few chapatis dipped in anemic dal. As a part of Puja special dish, Hari had brought back home a packet of milk from his Tea Stall with which the wife had made kheer by sprinkling some rice and an extra spoon of sugar for the children. The couple watched with joy as the children and the dog lapped up the kheer gleefully. That was the rare but sure joy of middle class Durgotsav which neither the haves nor the have not�s can experience.
The catch-22 situation for the middle class specimen is that he cannot ever dream of his upper class counterpart�s sleepless and dreamless life as the fault of the stars of the rich lies in their pursuance of unending wealth and the taxman�s axe; neither can the hollow-cheeked Hari think of going further down to the lower class economic subdivision and subjugation where begging, stealing for a change and scavenging for food and plastic in dustbins and drains and breeding on the footpaths and pavements and growing up at these places and fortunately dying in government hospitals or on roadsides is a socially accepted way of life and living.
But life has to move on and it does move on in spite of political pledges in poll manifestos, announcement of multifarious community schemes envisaged for the poor but enjoyed by the guys with clout or �source� in officially local parlance and who do not specifically belong to any of the three economically decrepit classifications. And so Hari lives, eats and breathes as he has done when he was born at age 70 and will live with that age till eternity for men may come and men may go but Hari will go on forever.
